


The Affix Of Her Skin

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 03:03:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When he presses her back against the low couch, the red and the purple and the green are still on his fingertips." Sokolov paints Vera Moray shortly before she leaves for the Pandyssian Continent. The accuracy of the painting and the price she pays him for it are both up for debate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Affix Of Her Skin

_“I was the only one, dearie, wet with his paint, glistening on the canvas for a pretty coin.”_

Vera Moray writes the figure down and slides it across the table toward him, but he only answers “no.”

He is a clever, clever boy – and he is a _boy_ in truth. He wears only the shadow of a beard and his face has yet to grow into his eyebrows or his nose, and his eyes are dark and lit from within. He’s a boy, and he’s already been named _genius_. And he works magic with a paintbrush, yes, but the main genius she can see is this: he makes himself scarce, makes himself _precious_ , sets the price of his portraits several times too high and then dares the nobility to pay. And pay they do.

 _Genius_ is so attractive. The fact that he’s young and Tyvian only adds to the scandalous allure.

She frowns at him. “You said you’d paint me,” she reminds him, gently but firmly.

“I did.”

Her frown deepens. The boy isn’t even looking at her. He’s looking around the room – it’s _her husband’s_ drawing room, an important distinction (everything in this house is either _his_ or _theirs;_ nothing is _hers_ ). It’s richly decorated with mementos of all their travels. The color scheme is inspired by Churners in Morley, all rich red furnishings, and the clock on the mantle is Tyvian, and the ship in the glass display case is an exact replica of the one that sailed them all around Serkonos. The curtains are the blue-green of stormy waves. The head of the small sword-nosed whale on the wall is from the deeps of the sea. It stares down at them with black glass eyes.

It is the third time they’ve met in this room. The first two had been glorious: she’d shown him ‘round, shown him all the relics of her travels around the Isles. She had _not_ , though he’d begged, told him the story of how she came by a single one; those stories were not his to posses. Now, however, the two of them are sitting, not standing, and they are talking of money and material things instead of things beyond the horizon, and the red curtains make the room seem very _dark_. She wants to throw them open. She wants to tear them down.

Sokolov points to a picture on the far wall, a diagram of the turnings of the stars. “That’s out of date,” he tells her. “You should have it replaced.”

“Is that your price?”

“No.” He folds his hands over one another. Tight like a wirework spring. “You and your husband are leaving for Pandyssia in a month’s time. I want your notes when you return. And any artifacts you find. All of them. That’s my price.”

Sokolov’s voice carries a heavy accent, and he’s trying very hard and doing a good job at losing it. He _cannot_ lose the way that his voice frays around the edges of the word _Pandyssia_. The way it makes him lean forward, darkens his eyes until they are almost black.

He is so _hungry_ for whatever knowledge she can bring him that his Academy cannot provide – and Vera Moray only answers “no.”

The research is her _life_ , she explains to him. She is not a woman who can ever sit still. She and her husband take the spoils of their travels back to Gristol and frame and cage and mount them upon their walls, yes – but when they are _out there_ , when the pair of them are far from home and no one knows her name and she walks at her husband’s side and not in anyone’s shadow, the world is alive and so is she. She travels for herself. She will research for no man but herself.

“When you said I was _radiant_ and said you’d paint me,” she explains to him, “it wasn’t because of anything I have here in Gristol. I’m a prisoner in Gristol. Tied down by all these _dreary_ social niceties and by men – not that men aren’t useful, but you’re _men_.” She smiles. “Not that I don’t adore high society, because I _deserve_ it, but I’m meant for more than that. When I travel none of this matters so much.”

Sololov _tsks_ under his breath. “This is why I wanted to paint you,” he grouses. “We both look _past_ all the nonsense in the world. We should not even be having this conversation.”

Vera Moray shrugs, and offers him a drink, because this is the way it is done. Her answer is still no. She changes the price. She offers him other things. She offers him things that do not matter.

She offers him more money.

She offers him her skin, and her husband’s reputation.

He accepts, on both counts, because he is a _boy_ and because he had called her _radiant_ and still believes it to be so. She expects him to be unpracticed, because boys and geniuses often are. She expects him to be coarse or savage, because he is Tyvian. She expects him to be delicate, artful, because she has seen his fingers on a paintbrush and seen the careful attention that he pays to the bodies that appear on his canvas in blots of gold and green and brilliant red. She is right on one count of three.

He is very attentive – not _to_ her, but _about_ her. He studies each part of her body as if he will need to paint her from memory and not from life. He _learns_ her. The planes that make up her shoulder blades, the exact color of the skin behind her knee, the sinusoidal curve of thigh to hip to waist. When he studies her with fingertips (stained with paint or oil or who knows what else), she finds this focus unsettling. It’s like being pinned under a bright light. Caught in the gaze of something so much more than herself.

When he chuckles a grudging apology and a muttered note about anatomy sketches into her hair, and does a second pass of the studies with his _mouth_ , she begins to revise her opinion.

She could get used to this.

She could get _used_ to being the object of such intent observation.

Sokolov decides to paint her in the drawing room, because he cannot imagine the Pandyssian sky they desire. He surrounds her, at first, with things from her travels with her husband – and then he cuts them out. He places her in front of the window. The first day, he does nothing but block out color. Solid daubs of red, black, and grey. A wide sweep of green like the sea for the curtains. A smear of pale purple for the window, because the light outside could be from anywhere and could well be from the Void itself.

When he presses her back against the low couch, the red and the purple and the green are still on his fingertips. Vera Moray does not care. It is _her husband’s_ couch, or _their_ couch, not _hers_ , and it is none of her concern if they stain it or what color these stains may be. And her clothes are only clothes. She can buy a million more. And her skin is only skin. She is so much more than this.

“Is this how you make them pay?” she asks him. “All the women you paint?”

“No.” He is a clever boy; he surely _understands_ the symbolism of leaving such bruises on her skin, but she doesn’t think that’s why he does it and doesn’t think he cares. Genius he may be, but in _this_ he’s very simple. She indulges him and tilts her head back just the same. “Yes,” he goes on. A rough laugh. “I don’t paint other women.”

“Liar.”

“Not yet, at least.”

“You will.” (But not _like this:_ not women with a wet smear of color across their hip the exact shade of a voyage across the sea, who listen to him beg for bones from Pandyssia and answer _no_. Never like this. There are no ones like her). “You will go far.”

“Of course I will.” He sounds so smug. He’s so young. “I deserve it.”

Vera Moray laughs, then; and the laugh turns broken and throaty, twists into other things before she can explain that _she deserves this too._

It takes a long time for the painting to be finished. She can’t really say that she minds.

(Her husband finds out, in the meanwhile, and the rumors swirl around them. But well-handled rumors can only enhance both her and Sokolov’s reputation. And her husband is like her, and loves her for the woman she is when they travel and _not_ the woman she must pretend to be in Gristol. And so all is well. Or well enough. She does not care).

When it’s unveiled, she studies it for a long time. Puts a finger to her lips, thoughtful, and turns to the left and right. She moves around the room to observe the way the colors change: she stands by the Morley-red chair, and the Tyvian clock, and the Serkonin ship, and finally before the window with the light of day at her back. The light, in reality, is white; in the painting it is violet. Shifted. Everything in the painting is shifted from what she had expected.

“I painted you as I saw you,” says Sokolov with a shrug. He’s unconcerned. He’s clever enough not to ask if she likes it.

(It’s lovely)

(It’s terrifying)

(She did not know that she had this much tension in her shoulders and hands, that she’d looked at him as if she were ready to murder or to weep at the same time. She did not know that her eyes were that _distant_ ).

Sokolov watches her with a self-satisfied glint to his eye. “Come back from Pandyssia, and I’ll paint you again.”

“The price will go up.”

“Of course the price will go up.”

Vera Moray laces her fingers in front of her, copies the laced fingers of her portrait. She looks fierce, and lost, and longing. She ponders. She has paid for this portrait in gold and in flesh, and it will pay her back in prestige and reputation. If she pays for a second, the price will include whatever she finds in Pandyssia. Bones and relics and research and stories. Secrets. Things that _matter_.

She shakes her head.

Sokolov curses under his breath. “I will paint you as you _should be_ ,” he presses. “As everyone should see you. I will place you on a ship, in the Academy, atop a _whale_ for the Outsider’s sake, whatever you wish. I will make you _brilliant_ – you already are, but - just give me whatever research you find on your expedition –”

“No.”

She is not a woman who can ever sit still, she explains again. Gently but firmly. She has sat for one portrait. She will not sit for a second. He has given her a picture of what he claims she _is_. And he is a genius – but he is very young, just a boy or just barely a man, and no boy and no _man_ will have a say in what she finds outside the bounds of Gristol and what she _wishes_ to be.

Sokolov leaves, cursing. And Vera Moray shuts the door and stands in the center of her husband’s room, surrounded by all the trappings of travels with her husband, and her portrait blazes before her. It is wholly hers. And it is _beautiful_. And it does not look like her at all. Sokolov is a clever boy who will grow to be a clever man, and he’s done this deliberately. He _must_ have.

It does not look like her, and it never will: because he has fixed her within a frame. Frozen her at one expression and one point in time. Because he has turned her, quite literally, into just another relic to be mounted upon the drawing-room wall.

It does not matter.

Vera Moray stands before the portrait, and she smiles.

_She is more than this._


End file.
